Abstract:

Eastern Judeo-Spanish was created and developed without contact with the Spanish, giving rise to the emergence of an autonomous diasystem that integrates a continuum of varieties with two main centres —Thessaloniki and Istanbul. Based on Castilian, Judeo-Spanish integrated patterns from all the Iberian languages ​​that the Jews spoke when they established in the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 15th century. There, Sephardim also came into contact with a continuum of structurally different languages, from which it incorporated numerous lexical borrowings in particular. Contact with Hebrew —the ethnoreligious language of Jewish communities— provided numerous lexical loans to Judeo-Spanish and, from the 18th century, it also resulted in structural changes that affected its morphology and syntax. Contact with French led to its reromanization when it became the language of culture of the Sephardim in the second half of the 19th century. Unable to resist the pressure towards integration exerted by the national states emerging from the progressive decomposition of the Ottoman Empire, the separation of the Sephardic nation into different states and the adoption of their languages, migration to the West, the massive extermination of its speakers perpetrated by the Nazis, and the exodus to Israel after 1948 contributed to the fragmentation of Judeo-Spanish and the loss of its vitality, ceasing to be the dominant language of its speakers. Since the end of the 19th century, a great structural modification of Judeo-Spanish takes place, which has increased in the last decades.

Judeo-Spanish as an autonomous diasystem, and its development in a multilingual and multicultural context in contact with several different languages, giving rise to a Spanish-based “variety of contact,” are the subjects of this contribution.